**Preface XI**



Preface

lish both humoral and cellular immunity.

Nowadays, immunization still plays a crucial role in maintaining human health, as it can be effectively employed for prophylaxis of various dangerous infections and erase many lifethreatening diseases. Thus, knowledge on immunization appears important not only to pro‐ fessionals who can use it for better carrying out their special work, but also to the general public, who will be readier to accept immunization after making acquaintance with the rele‐ vant information. In this book, authors from different countries introduced state-of-the-art advances in VADSs that are developed with various NPs, such as liposomes, non-degradable inorganic NPs (iNPs), VLPs, emulsions, ISCOMs and polymeric NPs, for treatment of differ‐ ent types of diseases, mainly infections and cancer. The content includes: design principles, formulations and rationales of these NPs, which have been devised as an effective VADS able to stimulate potent Ag-specific humoral and cellular immune responses; the applications of VADSs in infection prophylaxis, as well as cancer immunotherapy; problems and their reso‐ lution in both human and poultry immunization; and, also, the mathematical model for assay of the basic immunization problem (BIP) that is observed from a financial point of view.

Wu et al described the VADS constructed with the small molecule-self-assembled NPs, such as inorganic NPs (iNPs), emulsions, liposomes, and ISCOMs, which are well designed for the development of subunit vaccines able to not only deliver vaccine ingredients to immune cells but also direct the immunoresponse toward a Th1 and Th2 balanced pathway to estab‐

Liu and coworkers introduced NPs formulated with polymeric materials, such as poly(lac‐ tic-co-glycolic acid), viral proteins, chitosan, hyaluronic acid, and polystyrene, with some also bearing intrinsic adjuvanticity, which are widely employed as a VADS and have shown great potential in developing various subunit vaccines. Particularly, the polymeric NPs engi‐ neered with functional materials possess many features, such as targeting delivery, lyso‐ some escape, anti-damaging protection and ability to guide immune reactions toward a Th1

Shen and colleagues presented a chapter on VADS used for cancer immunotherapy, which has recently been rapidly developed, at least partially, as a result of the advancement in both exploring powerful tools for identification of tumor-associated antigens (tAgs) and reveal‐ ing the mechanisms underlying immunoresponses toward tumors. Notably, cancer immu‐ notherapy has already shown remarkable therapeutic potentials, as evidenced by the striking outcomes of clinical applications of the adoptive cell transfer (ACT) and the im‐ mune checkpoint inhibitors, which has significantly encouraged researchers to formulate tAgs with NPs to form a VADS and to provide an alternative way to enhancing the efficacy

and Th2 pathway, which are crucial for establishing humoral and cellular immunity.
